I need them to be taken out."īut these culls are not wasted. "Those fish are competing with my big bass for food. "I don't want anglers releasing any small fish they catch," Frazier said. Here, only the biggest fish are released.
Long the standard at virtually all managed fisheries in the bass world, it does not work at Camelot Bell. One of those hard decisions involves catch-and-release. "You can manage for numbers of bass," he says, "or you can manage for the biggest bass possible, but you can't do both on the same body of water."
(Photos courtesy of Camelot Bell) THE SYSTEMĪpart from superior genetics, a big part of Frazier's system is simply the commitment to stick with it and to make hard decisions. Since bass at Camelot Bell are the only real predators in the water and have an abundance of high-protein food available all year long, they grow 3 to 4 pounds per year. Even so, Frazier’s success has been remarkable. The biggest largemouths ever recorded have been either pure Floridas or intergrades between Florida bass and their Northern cousins. The tendency of Florida bass to grow to sizes that others in the Micropterus genus cannot reach is well-established. His investment started with building the 40-acre lake that Frazier calls "Bell." With the help of a biologist friend, he stocked it with 250 pure Florida bass and plenty of food. These include threadfin and gizzard shad, bluegill, redear sunfish, crawfish, tilapia and even rainbow trout that he stocks in winter.Īs Frazier explains with understatement, "You can spend a lot of money at this game!" The lakes at Camelot Bell feature pure Florida bass (Micropterus salmoides floridanus) and a variety of forage that Frazier oversees with an ever vigilant eye and an iron fist.
"I didn’t want any other predators or any other strains of bass getting in the way." "First of all, it was critical that there were no creeks or streams draining into my lake," Frazier says.
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